The Attic (a name which commemorates our first physical location) is, first and foremost, a site for the research students of the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester: a virtual community which aims to include all students, be they campus-based and full-time, or distance-learning and overseas. But we welcome contributions from students of museum studies - and allied subject areas - from outside the School and from around the world. Here you will find a lot of serious stuff, like exhibition and research seminar reviews, conference alerts and calls for papers, but there's also some 'fluff'; the things that inspire, distract and keep us going. After all, while we may be dead serious academic types, we're human too.

Saturday, February 16, 2013

Upcoming Conference at V&A on Childhood

A conference on childhood that welcomes papers on material culture ofchildhood...

The Child in the World will be a one day conference on 9 November 2013 heldat the V&A Museum of Childhood in London. Dr Karen Wells will be thekeynote speaker.

The deadline for paper submissions has been extended to *13 March 2013*.

• How have children’s lives been shaped by global processes and events,both past and present?• How do children understand their place within the world and how has thissense of place changed or remained the same?• How have children’s lives been shaped by experiences of global travel, ofmigration and displacement?

We invite contributions exploring these questions, particularly in relationto children’s everyday experiences of the global. We welcome papers whichtrace children’s voices and experiences via a range of methodologies andsource materials, both tangible and intangible, such as the objects theyuse and own, the books and other materials they read, the programmes andfilms they watch, the technological equipment they have access to, theclothes they wear, the games they play, and the testimonials theythemselves provide.

We encourage contributions from colleagues throughout the arts and socialsciences, including in particular those working within the fields ofchildhood studies, geography, museum studies, children’s literature andculture. In addition to abstracts for 20-minute papers, we also welcome thesubmission of panels and of formats other than standard papers (such aslightning talks, posters or discussions).

We plan to bring together written versions of the presentations to form thebasis of a special issue in a relevant journal.This conference forms part of an ongoing, AHRC-funded collaborative projectbetween QMUL and the Museum of Childhood. For more information about theproject, please go to: http://www.geog.qmul.ac.uk/research/childinthe world/index.html

***STOP PRESS***

PhD Conferences

We have a new PhD conference upcoming this year November 5-6th 2013. It is called Museum Metamorphosis and is all about the adaptable and changing museums of today. We are sponsored by AHRC and in partnership with Leicester Museums. The official website and details can be found here.

Last year's PhD student conference was held March 27-28 2012, and was titled Museum Utopias; it was supported by the University of Leicester and Hanwell. It was an intreguing two days of utopic ideals and realities in museums today. Details are available on the official website. Read the blog for a session-by-session review of the conference.

The 2011 conference was held in Leicester March 28-30, and was called Curiouser & Curiouser; supported financially by the University of Leicester, it was an exciting three days of the weird and wonderful in heritage studies. Read the blog to find out more. We also held a highly successful PhD student symposium in December 2009. Read the blog.